The majority of things that people do are for selfish motives. People are well aware that there are other people in their locality who haven't eaten for days but they make no effort to sacrifice their own meal for them. When people go to work, they do it in return for money and would rarely overwork for the benefit of the company or the people the company serves. When people give gifts it's almost always for an occasion like a birthday or anniversary, people hardly ever just randomly give someone a gift. They meet an expectation of them in order that by satisfying that expectation they get an emotional reward (sometimes physical if lucky). Defining people as selfish doesn't mean they act selfishly 100% of the time, just the majority of the time and it's the exception when they don't. That's why people need to be encouraged to donate money; if people get nothing out of it then a lot of people simply wouldn't bother. It's a sad fact and the danger is in turning that observation into a positive life philosophy i.e recognising that people primarily look out for themselves and therefore that should be promoted as a good thing. Selfishness needs to be fought against or at least controlled to benefit the majority and that takes effort.

The majority of things that people do are for selfish motives. People are well aware that there are other people in their locality who haven't eaten for days but they make no effort to sacrifice their own meal for them. When people go to work, they do it in return for money and would rarely overwork for the benefit of the company or the people the company serves. When people give gifts it's almost always for an occasion like a birthday or anniversary, people hardly ever just randomly give someone a gift. They meet an expectation of them in order that by satisfying that expectation they get an emotional reward (sometimes physical if lucky). Defining people as selfish doesn't mean they act selfishly 100% of the time, just the majority of the time and it's the exception when they don't. That's why people need to be encouraged to donate money; if people get nothing out of it then a lot of people simply wouldn't bother. It's a sad fact and the danger is in turning that observation into a positive life philosophy i.e recognising that people primarily look out for themselves and therefore that should be promoted as a good thing. Selfishness needs to be fought against or at least controlled to benefit the majority and that takes effort.

I would say that you have a deeply cynical view of life that isn't true to the reality of it.

Here in England, there is no need to go hungry, as we cater for the homeless.

For you to say anecdotally that people hardly ever give a gift randomly is incredibly stupid. I can only presume that you speak for yourself, which would be sad. In my experience, people can be amazingly selfless and helpful. Yes, we can all be bad, we all are bad some of the time, but I don't recognise your vision of humanity.

Oooh, how about that dude from the Koran, Muhammad or something, you know, the prophet guy with all of those virgin's. Which frankly I never understood the appeal, wouldn't a guy rather have 70 professionals, you know, the kind of girls you have to use a safe word with to make her stop dripping wax on your balls. 75 virgin's just sounds like, hmmmm, oh, a big ol'e sticky mess, the dry cleaning bill alone after the first nights orgy is going to be massive.

Again, I didn't say people are never selfless, it is just the exception. If it was commonplace, they would run out of awards for selfless services or not bother handing them out as they do now. There's a video here that shows how cruel humans can be. It's a disturbing video as it shows a 2 year old child left to die on a road in China after being run over:

That sort of thing wouldn't happen everywhere but the motivation in events like that wouldn't always be to help out and would rather be to avoid being seen as a complete degenerate by not helping out. In extreme cases like that, I would hope that most civilized people would help out but it's easy to see how people can be selfish in trivial scenarios when they can be in extreme cases like that.

If you want to believe that everyone is volunteering their work, giving gifts away at random and helping to end poverty and disease, so be it. It's not a world that I recognize.

"A chef at Baghdad's exclusive Hunting Club recalls a wedding party that Uday crashed in the late 1990s. After Uday left the hall, the bride, a beautiful woman from a prominent family, went missing. "The bodyguards closed all the doors, didn't let anybody out," the chef remembers. "Women were yelling and crying, 'What happened to her?'" The groom knew. "He took a pistol and shot himself," says the chef, placing his forefinger under his chin."

Uday kidnapped virgins specifically and quite a few killed themselves out of shame, sometimes they'd be burned with acid directly after so that no one else would have the same experience. It's the idea of exclusivity I suppose, pure selfishness.

Again, I didn't say people are never selfless, it is just the exception. If it was commonplace, they would run out of awards for selfless services or not bother handing them out as they do now.

If you want to believe that everyone is volunteering their work, giving gifts away at random and helping to end poverty and disease, so be it. It's not a world that I recognize.

Problem is, Marvin, you see things in black and white; the world isn't like that.

The great marvel of the world is that it is full of countless people doing countless selfless acts of love that are never formally recognised. That doesn't mean, however, that they don't happen. I don't need to believe that everyone does volunteering; I know that many do.

Trying to tally the number of awards for good service isn't a good way of trying to measure humanity's selflessness. Whilst getting an award is nice, it's not really a necessary thing. Volunteering services or giving as an act of charity is its own reward. For some lucky people, even their regular work is done as an act of love or vocation. They may get paid for it, but it isn't what drives them. I think Sir Jonathan Ive made some statement to this effect quite recently.

When you see the news, it is easy to form the impression that humanity is very black, as most news is bad news. Good news doesn't sell.